DFO mum on whether it will protect elvers from poachers next year

A senior Fisheries and Oceans Canada officer says someone has been charged with poaching elvers.

But the department won’t provide any details on the charges.

The acknowledgement last week by Scott Phillips, DFO area chief of conservation and protection, that someone had been charged was the first sign of legal consequences for anyone after a lawless spring on Nova Scotia’s rivers.

April and May saw widespread poaching and violence on this province’s rivers as both Mi’kmaw seeking to assert moderate livelihood rights and non-aboriginal poachers chased juvenile American eels (elvers) that are worth $4,000 a kilogram.

“It’s crazy out there; there’s guns being pulled on people. It’s nuts man. . . . My take is that DFO isn’t charging anybody and they’re just waiting for the natives and non-natives to start at it like they did with the lobster,” former Sipekne’katik chief Mike Sack told The Chronicle Herald in May.

“But now it’s everybody against everybody.”

While the federal government claimed it was enforcing the Fisheries Act on Nova Scotia’s rivers in the spring, nobody else seemed to believe it. DFO has been accused by commercial fishermen, property owners and First Nations of abdicating its enforcement responsibility.

Everyone’s waiting to see if DFO will start charging and prosecuting those caught fishing without a licence when the elvers return next spring.

For Sarah Stewart-Clark, that’s the question on which hangs both the future of the American eel and the communities, both Mi’kmaw and non-aboriginal, who rely upon the species.

“When you have neither monitoring nor enforcement, you don’t have a sustainable fishery,” said Stewart-Clark, a Dalhousie University biologist who has studied American eels.

“We’ve started harvesting at an unknown exploitation rate, and we are risking the stability of that fish stock for future generations. I’m also angry at the lack of priority in protecting a resource that is economically important to Atlantic Canada. The message it’s sending me is that the federal government does not care about these small, rural Maritime communities.”

Arresting vs. charging and prosecuting

“There have been charges,” said Phillips last week.

“Obviously, I can’t talk about active cases.”

Unlike the RCMP, which issues news releases with a brief description of an incident along with where it occurred, who was charged with what and when they’ll appear in court, DFO won’t release any information on the charges.

Phillips directed The Chronicle Herald to the federal public prosecution service.

“We are not able to provide you with the data you requested,” reads a written response from Nathalie Houle, spokeswoman for the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, to The Chronicle Herald’s request for information on any charges related to the illegal harvest of elvers.

“The PPSC’s electronic filing system is designed for management of operational files and time keeping, not for compiling general statistics.”

Houle declined a request that she ask the Crown prosecutors responsible for fisheries offences in Nova Scotia for the information. She didn’t respond to a followup request for the relevant prosecutor’s contact information.

A freedom of information request submitted by The Chronicle Herald seeking information on enforcement activities by DFO was given a 240-day extension by the office responsible, citing the wildfires around Halifax as a reason.

Both licensed commercial elver fishermen and unlicensed fishermen spoken to by The Chronicle Herald say that DFO hasn’t been laying charges.

For its part, DFO points to 70 arrests made between April 14 and the end of May, the seizure of gear, a pickup truck and 123 kilograms of elvers. But an arrest without a charge prosecuted through the courts has no legal consequences.

On April 15, DFO closed the commercial fishery, telling the 11 licence holders (two of which are First Nations) that they estimated unlicensed harvesters had caught the balance of the 9,860-kilogram Nova Scotia quota.

At that point, 4,650 kilograms of elvers had been caught legally.

“So it’s pretty basic math that DFO estimated the poachers had already taken around 5,000 kilograms,” Brian Giroux, one of 17 members of the licence-holding Shelburne Elver Co-operative, told The Chronicle Herald in May.

The unlicensed harvest continued unabated after the commercial season closed until the end of the annual elver run. While commercial fishermen set up trail cameras and sent daily updates to DFO on where harvesting was taking place, there appeared to be no enforcement.

They also told DFO about the seafood terminal at a Toronto-area airport where most of the illegal elvers were being flown out of on their way to Chinese buyers, who raise them to adulthood and then sell them into the Japanese seafood market.

But there were no busts reported at the airport and it’s unclear whether DFO ever attempted to shut down that export route.

Someone went as far to set up a fyke net in Fish Hatchery Park in Bedford, 2.4 kilometres from the DFO office, and work it during the day.

“We caught Hurons from Ontario, First Nations members from New Hampshire and Maine, all of them coming down here to exercise their moderate livelihood (right),” said Giroux.

“What happens is the government is not charging First Nations; basically, they’re issuing them warnings. It’s catch and release; they’re on the same river the next night. We’ve met people who told us they’d had three or four warnings.”

In the absence of enforcement, non-aboriginal poachers who have no claim to a moderate livelihood arrived in droves.

Giroux estimated 40 per cent of the unlicensed harvesters were non-aboriginal, while Sack estimated half of them were.

While Phillips wouldn’t give details on what charges have been laid, he inferred that more may be coming.

“It does take time to go through the review process, do the investigation, and it does take time,” said Phillips

“We do work alongside our Public Prosecution Service of Canada and it takes them a while. They have so many other (cases), not just fisheries. . . . We do appreciate some of the comments that have been coming and we do understand, it is a slow process.”

Next year

Stewart-Clark warns that if DFO continues to abdicate its responsibility to enforce the Fisheries Act, they will imperil the future of the American eel.

She explained that fishery managers calculate how much of a given species can be harvested without affecting its ability to maintain or grow its total population.

DFO subscribes to ecosystem management, meaning managers also look at the roles the target species play in the broader ecosystem and how harvesting can be doing damage.

According to DFO, the quota for 2023 was caught largely by illegal harvesters less than halfway through elver season. Then illegal harvesting continued unabated through the rest of the season.

“When we don’t have enforcement and we have illegal fishing, we have removed the ability for a sustainable fishery,” said Stewart-Clark.

“DFO is supposed to be ensuring American eel populations continue to exist for those Mi’kmaw communities and managing them in a sustainable way to make sure Atlantic Canada has prosperity in the future.”

A Chronicle Herald request to DFO asking for details on any charges related to elver poaching, whether there are concerns illegal fishing will affect species viability and if they intended to change their enforcement strategy in 2024 did not receive a response by Thursday.